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Opinion: There's still much more to do to address gender inequality in workplace

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Heather Howell, chief tea officer of Louisville, Ky.-based Rooibee Red Tea and chairwoman of the board of directors of MBA Women International, says women face not just a pay gap at work, but also an opportunity gap.

Last month’s report by the Harvard Business Review could be called a State of the Woman Address. The publication aggregates the latest, most relevant data on women in the workplace from McKinsey & Co., Catalyst and Harvard Business School, among others.

Perhaps more shocking than the wage gap between men and women is the difference in salary between mothers and childless women — $11,000 on average. Participants in a discrimination experiment were asked to rate equally qualified job applicants. They rated a mother lower than a woman without children because, they confessed, they thought she would be less committed to the job. Fathers did not receive this same penalty.

While the wage gap is the most objective form of discrimination, perhaps other, subtler disparities are more lethal. Consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found that women in leadership received higher rankings than their male counterparts when it came to 16 core competencies.

However, fewer women are actually attaining leadership roles, with the percentage of women decreasing on each ascending rung of the ladder. So it’s clear women are capable leaders. Yet increasingly they either opt out of or are denied promotion. Why?

The conventional wisdom around this question has been that women are voluntarily abandoning careers to care for children. Yet another finding in the Harvard Business Review concludes that “workplace problems” are the major contribution to women leaving the workforce, not childbearing. What is the nature of these “problems?” We can’t be sure, but we can guess.

Women face a paltry support system within the workplace when compared with men. In a group of MBA graduates, the women received fewer important assignments, smaller budgets and less profit-and-loss responsibility at their jobs than the men. With fewer opportunities once they get the jobs, women have fewer chances to advance.

The opportunity gap lies at the center of a vicious cycle: Any professional needs a mentor-like boss to succeed. Since most bosses are men, often women fail to connect with their male superiors and do not advance into management roles. Their male co-workers do connect, advance, become bosses themselves and the cycle continues.

Heather Howell, chief tea officer of Louisville, Ky.-based Rooibee Red Tea, is chairwoman of the board of directors of MBA Women International, a Seattle-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of businesswomen as corporate leaders, executives and entrepreneurs — enriching workforce diversity around the world.